How the Poem "The Waste Land" Constitute a Coherent Whole.

The Waste Land has generally been criticized as lacking structural principle. The work has been regarded by some people as a collection of some separate poems. But on a careful study of the poem it has been found that there is a thin and subtle thread which runs throughout the poem and gives it a sort of unity.

Structure of the Poem "The Waste Land":

Tiresias, the protagonist, imparts a sense of unity to the poem as a whole. Through the stream of consciousness method Tiresias reflects on events of the past and the present, and sees a lot of resemblance between them. He mixes the past with the present and through symbols the distance of time and space is destroyed.

Eliot deliberately chose the mythical method for obvious advantages. Firstly it helps in concretizing parallelism between past and present. Secondly it bridges the gulf between the crisis in human history and civilization.

V. Sola Pinto considers the technique of the poem to be "The music of ideas" in five movements. The main themes are introduced in the first section, and are developed in the second and third. The fourth section "Death by Water" forms a short lyric interlude which reminds us what the rest of the poem is about. The fifth section is the climax.

Thus the poem The Waste Land has coherent formal structure. The first section, The Burial of the Dead, indicates the pain of spring the pain that must accompany the stirrings of new life: "April is the cruelest month". This section also brings before us the death-in-life of the unreal city. The second section "A Game of Chess" emphasizes by illustration the deadness first of wealth and then of poverty in the waste city, dead with a kind of dreary vitality. The third section, "The Fire Sermon" brings a picture of the city's vanished splendour and beauty, contrasts it with its present state, widens the themes by invocation of St. Augustine and Carthage and his conversation, and has the first hint of a redeeming conception of an Eternal city. The very short fourth section "Death by Water" reminds us that the water that brings life also brings death. The last section "What the Thunder Said", recalls what happens after Christ's agony in the garden. Christian symbols unite with Arthurian symbols to mark the end of the waste time, the beginning perhaps of a new life after a sacrificial death. Meanwhile the storm is coming to The Waste Land, but with it will come the life giving water too.

This formal structure is coherent and indicates a sequence. The Waste Land relies not on a framework of narrative, but on a sequence of highly concentrated impressions.